Business intelligence applications allow a company to perform tasks such as gathering data from heterogeneous sources, analyzing such data, and producing reports. Traditionally, a business intelligence application includes one or more stack elements configured to perform data retrieval, integration, management, and/or reporting functions. The stack elements typically require some knowledge of the structure and content of data available from various sources, and as a result under existing approaches considerable administrative effort may be required to enable a typical business intelligence application to use (e.g., include in a proper or desired way in a report) data associated with a data field newly added at a source.